Javascript Code Churn Rate?

[Ethan Resnick]

> To the extent that the web is used for applications, this is probably OK,
but for documents this is really a bad approach because we (well at least
some of us) want those to continue to be readable as the web evolves.

Sure, I can appreciate that. And the academic/researcher in me definitely
likes the idea of never removing a language feature.

I guess I was just asking in case anyone felt there could be some (very,
very low) level of breakage that's tolerable. After all, links/images
already go bad pretty regularly and removing bits of JS wouldn't make the
web the only medium for which old equipment (here, an old browser) is
required to view old content. On that front, print is the remarkable
exception; most everything else (audio recordings, video recordings,
conventional software) is pretty tightly bound to its original technology.
Of course, "other mediums suck at longevity too" isn't much of an argument,
but if there's a tradeoff here, maybe it's worth keeping in mind.

Regardless, it seems like there are many less radical approaches that
deprioritize old features without making them strictly unavailable, so I'm
still curious to know about JS churn rates, if that data exists, to get a
sense of the timescale for those approaches.
On Nov 10, 2015 6:58 AM, "Boris Zbarsky" <bzbarsky at mit.edu> wrote:

> On 11/10/15 7:41 AM, Ethan Resnick wrote:
>
>> And how long until they could remove support for the rest of the
>> language altogether?
>>
>
> This makes the fundamental assumption that it's OK to break old things
> just because they're old.  To the extent that the web is used for
> applications, this is probably OK, but for documents this is really a bad
> approach because we (well at least some of us) want those to continue to be
> readable as the web evolves.  Otherwise we end up with a "dark ages" later
> on where things that appeared in print continue to be readable while later
> digital stuff, even if still available, is not.
>
> And in this case "documents" includes things like interactive New York
> Times stuff and whatnot...
>
> -Boris
>
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